According to a recent announcement, Nokia/Qt Software has decided to discontinue the development of Qt Jambi after the March 2009 release of version 4.5. Jambi is a Java version of the popular Qt toolkit. The library will be made available under the LGPL license, and Qt Software will host and facilitate a community driven continuation of Jambi.

As for the language issue, Java doesn't really give you much over C++/Qt.

I fully agree. The primary major advantage of Java (platform-independence) evaporates when you combine it with a native toolkit. Java is stuck in a hard place when it comes to desktop applications. I have seen very few people who actually like Swing. And there is not much reason to use Java plus a native toolkit over C++ with the comfort of Qt (or some other language/toolkit combination). Sun seems to have lost two opportunities: Microsoft closed the window on their desktop when the released .NET. Another window of opportunity could have been the open source release in the form of OpenJDK, but it did not make a major impact there either (with GNOME-Java in a constant state of flux and Jambi still in its infancy). The fact that Qt will be LGPL doesn't help.

Of course, it's still big as an application server and on some phones. And it will probably stay a while.

One real danger is that C# will replace Java as the education language if it can not keep up. As if it weren't bad enough to have C/C++/Pascal/LISP/whatever replaced .

For the typical mass-market desktop app, you're likely right. It is not the fastest and leanest, it looks the ugliest and integrates the poorest! But there's a lot more to Java than that, which is missing from the C++ ecosystem. Bare Java+SWING is a platform comparable in breadth to c++/Qt, but there are very, very many ultra-high level libraries and extensions which make Java the chosen language for complex software engineering, possibly far ahead of C#.

There's libraries and subsystems for 3D, graphs, database, object persistence, remote invocation, collaboration, documentation, modelling, web server, scientific programming, scripting languages... A lot of the available stuff is so special that it is very difficult just to understand what it is for! Just take a tour of the projects in the Apache foundation: it is dizzying!

And now comes JavaFX (which might be DOA) and Android, which looks like a revolution in the making.

In all, learning Java is an e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y sound investment, even if you don't like the language, which, by the way, is a lot faster an leaner than it used to be, and should get better.